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After seeing Legally Blonde 2: Red, White and Blonde, I was struck with the overly simplistic message that was layered beneath the perfume and bubbly-ness of Reese Witherspoon . . . our nation has lost it’s voice. Now a lot of you may be scratching your heads and saying “How could we have lost our voice if we’re saying this?” but I mean political voice. In LB2RWB, Reese Witherspoon’s character Elle Woods is planning her wedding to Luke Wilson (whatever his character name was) and she ABSOLUTELY has to invite her male Chihuahua’s mother. Unfortunately she discovers that Bruiser’s mom is a test subject at Versace labs (like omigawd!) which isn’t the fancy Versace, but this really horrible evil company that tests products on helpless animals. So Elle decides to go to Congress and get legislation passed that prevents the torture of poor helpless animals (damned bleeding-heart Liberals!). So, just like the first movie, she encounters a trial by fire of the legislative branch of government, but ultimately triumphs and gets Bruiser’s mom to the wedding. But the point I mentioned earlier is that it took one person to get this legislation. The fact is, nowadays, big corporations support congressmen, I mean congresspersons, to kill bill’s in sub-committee’s rather then letting democracy work. Big corporations are not “we the people”. But we let big corporations and lobbyists decide how the country is run instead of taking an active role. Then the real irony is we sit around and complain. If you’re not even trying to get something changed, then you have no right to complain.

Another thing I’m tired of is celebrities abusing their publicity to promote their views on world issues. I’m sorry Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, but I just don’t care if you think the war in Iraq is unjustified and that we shouldn’t be imposing our will on other countries (personally, I support the war, because Saddam was a really bad guy). And now the Democrats are whining about there being no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Gee, maybe that’s because he used them all up on HIS OWN PEOPLE! Geez, what does it take to get through to you touchy-feely chowder-heads.

But that’s the difference between liberal and conservative viewpoints. Conservative favors the logic of a situation whereas liberal focuses on the feeling or emotion. I feel like a liberal and think like a conservative. I guess that makes me independent. Nope, I’m a declared Republican, because no matter what I feel, I’m still gonna think up a great comeback.

Now I branch off onto Matrix Philosophy.

There’s a lot about the first movie that people didn’t really focus on. By people I mean me. Like how Tank could download skills into rebel’s brains. Or how they hacked into the matrix. Or why there aren’t cows fueling the robots. What? Cows? Where am I going with this? Well the point is that humans are plugged into the matrix because we provide the one thing that machines have no understanding of: true consciousness. See, being human means being able to lay awake at night ponder your existence. Like Rene Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” That’s not to say that if we don’t think we are, then we won’t be. That reminds me of a joke I heard. Rene Descartes walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Would you like anything to drink?” and Rene says, “I think not,” and he disappears. That’s Robin Williams talking about MIT. They’re the ones that heckle A Beautiful Mind. They sit in the theatre going, “The formula’s are wrong. It’s a finite formula, FINITE!” MIT, the only place in the world where Stephen Hawking can do comedy. And then he tells that joke. But enough of the sidebar.

Current machines and any future machines based on the current format cannot achieve true consciousness. In the “Desert of the Real” sequence, Morpheus says that the machines combined a new type of fusion with the BTU’s to fuel themselves. Here is a transcript (available at http://www.ds2.pg.gda.pl/~colan/screenplay.htm) that adds meaning to my explanations. What he doesn’t know, is that the fusion provides the energy while the humans provide consciousness. I just realized that this sounds a little peculiar due to the whole self-awareness argument presented in the Terminator movies. Skynet became self-aware and turned against it’s human masters. But that’s not consciousness. It can’t evolve past a certain extent. That’s all I can say on that matter. The reason I mentioned cows is that cows are a much better source of BTU’s and would be less likely to rebel against their robot masters if they noticed a subtle difference in the simulated pasture created for them. This idea was supported by Robert Sawyer, a popular science fiction writer, in Taking the Red Pill. But if you pick up this book, the one essay (for this book is a collection of essays by a variety of authors) you have to read that explains a lot of things is Peter B. Lloyd’s essay titled Glitches In The Matrix . . .And How To Fix Them. He explains so much that I can’t even tell you about it without quoting him verbatim (which I’m sure is illegal but I’m too lazy to do it right now). Come back in a couple of weeks to check out new stuff.

(Lafayette Hotel)
Trinity: This is it. Let me give you one piece of advice. Be honest. He knows more than you can imagine.
Morpheus: At last. Welcome, Neo. As you no doubt have guessed, I am Morpheus.
Neo: It’s an honor to meet you.
Morpheus: No, the honor is mine. Please, come. Sit. I imagine that right now you’re feeling a bit like Alice, tumbling down the rabbit hole? Hm?
Neo: You could say that.
Morpheus: I can see it in your eyes. You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up. Ironically, this is not far from the truth. Do you believe in fate, Neo?
Neo: No.
Morpheus: Why not?
Neo: Because I don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my life.
Morpheus: I know exactly what you mean. Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something.
What you know you can’t explain. But you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life. That there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I’m talking about?
Neo: The Matrix?
Morpheus: Do you want to know what it is? The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind…. Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself. This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes… Remember, all I’m offering is the truth, nothing more… Follow me… Apoc, are we online?
Apoc: Almost.
Morpheus: Time is always against us. Please, take a seat there.
Neo: You did all this?
Trinity: Uh-huh.
Morpheus: The pill you took is part of a trace program. It’s designed to disrupt your input/output carrier signals so we can pinpoint your location.
Neo: What does that mean?
Cypher: It means buckle your seat belt, Dorothy, ’cause Kansas is going bye-bye.
Neo: Did you…
Morpheus: Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?
Neo: This can’t be…
Morpheus: Be what? Be real?
Trinity: It’s going into replication.
Morpheus: Apoc?
Apoc: Still nothing.
Neo: It’s cold. It’s cold.
Morpheus: Tank, we’re going to need a signal soon.
Trinity: We’ve got a fibrillation!
Morpheus: Apoc, location!
Apoc: Targeting, almost there.
Trinity: He’s going into arrest!
Apoc: Lock, I got him.
Morpheus: Now, Tank. Now!
Morpheus: What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. This is the world that you know. The world as it was at the end of the twentieth century. It exists now only as part of a neural-interactive simulation that we call the Matrix. You’ve been living in a dream world, Neo. This is the world as it exists today… Welcome.. to the desert.. of the real. We have only bits and pieces of information but what we know for certain is that at some point in the early twenty-first century all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI.
Neo: AI? You mean artificial intelligence?
Morpheus: A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. We don’t know who struck first, us or them. But we know that it was us that scorched the sky. At the time they were dependent on solar power and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun. Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. The human body generates more bio-electricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat. Combined with a form of fusion, the machines have found all the energy they would ever need. There are fields, endless fields, where human beings are no longer born. We are grown. For the longest time I wouldn’t believe it, and then I saw the fields with my own eyes. Watch them liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to the living. And standing there, facing the pure horrifying precision, I came to realize the obviousness of the truth. What is the Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this.